Summary

These are the parts associated with a tutorial on how to design an electronic enclosure with a removable front panel design.

Instructions

This is a clam-shell enclosure with a removable front faceplate. The tutorial on how to design and print this is found in the article "Enclosures - 3D Printing's Killer App (Part 3 - Design enclosures with front panels)" on the Inhale3D website ( http://www.inhale3d.com )
Part 3:
http://www.inhale3d.com/2012/12/enclosures-3d-printings-killer-app-part-3-designing-enclosures-with-front-panels/

There is a two-part video tutorial showing how the enclosure parts are designed in ViaCAD 3D. The source ViaCAD files can be downloaded and modified as you see fit. The STL files can be printed, but this is effectively a fictitious design to demonstrate end-to-end how a more complex enclosure can be made.

The fictitious PCB is not meant to be printed but rather is used in the tutorial for the solid-modeling and faceplate creation. It's included here for completeness and to be used if you're following along with the tutorial.

The enclosure was test printed on a LulzBot AO-100, 0.35mm nozzle, 0.25mm layer height, 0.5 infill density with 2 vertical shells. GCode generated with Slic3r 0.9.7 and print controlled with Macpronterface. At these settings the main shell took a fair amount of time to print - 3+ hours but because of the rounded edges, it's worth doing a fairly high-resolution print if possible. I've made the Slic3r INI file available for download if you would like to use it as a starting point for a print - the INI file is called "Inhale3D-enclosure.ini" and is the exact config I used to print these parts.

The article shows some of the flaws seen after the first print of this and what to do about them - that's the nature of this "art", things don't come out perfectly the first time, but this one was fairly close to what was intended.

Thanks for checking it out.

Landon Cox
http://www.inhale3d.com

Electronic enclosure with front panel design